Saturday, April 05, 2008

Apocalypse Now, Actually 0n April 15

The new State ethics disclosure regulations may do some serious house cleaning on local boards and commissions. What politician in their right mind would want to have all their finances as a public record? Besides that they also need to report the names and addresses of relatives. If I were in politics I wouldn’t want a disgruntled constituent calling my mother to complain about my decisions at three am.

The Planning Department of Elgin Oregon all resigned because of these new disclosure regulations.

Is any ones’ finances so boring that they don’t mind disclosing information that will still be out there long after they give up their office many elections down the road? My finances are real boring, yet I would not want them being accessible to the public. I don’t even like to use my Fred Meyer Rewards Card because I become fodder for their marketing machine. They know too much about me already; rat bastards.

All I’m saying is that I won’t be a bit surprised if many local elected officials jump like lemmings on April 15 unless someone puts an end to this new disclosure regulation. There may be a lot of board, commission, council and mayoral seats up for reappointment (too late for an election) in May. This may become a political Apocalypse on Oregon.

5 Comments:

The Oregon Legislature meets unConstitutionally, under the guise of having an emergency ... and passes legislation that may create an actual emergency. Then says they won't get around to looking at possibly fixing it until their regular session in 2009.

btw - Betsy Johnson said the emergency was that the budget was too complicated. So what did they do to "uncomplicate" it?

Most of your info is already out there, somebody need only connect the dots. Every time you divulge stuff it's accessible to the great computer in the sky. It's scary what can be found out if you know how and have access to the databases.

I always figure that's a benefit of being far less that wealthy, no incriminating info if I ever do run for dog catcher:)

There's a world of difference between "knowing how and having access to databases" and an outright public record which any Joe Blow can obtain.

This is a classic example of legislators, rather than deal with all sorts of very real problems facing our State, wasting the taxpayer's time and money fixing something that wasn't broken to begin with.